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Nobel Prize Winner Argues Tech Companies Should Be Changing The World (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Tech companies are competing to serve the wealthy, argues the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, complaining there's no "global vision," with big innovations instead "designed and dedicated mostly for commercial successes... while trillions of dollars are invested in developing robotics and artificial intelligence for military and commercial purposes, there is little interest in applying technology to overcome the massive human problems of the world." A genius in the tech industry "can dedicate his work to creating a medical breakthrough that will save thousands of lives -- or he can develop an app that will let people amuse themselves."
As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
As an exception, he cites the low-cost Endless computer, which runs Linux and has 50,000 Wikipedia articles pre-installed to enable offline research -- plus more than 100 applications -- for a price of just $79. "One part of Endless's business is operated like a conventional, profit-seeking company, while the other part is a social business that provides underserved populations with educational, health, and creative services they were once denied. Endless is already being shipped around the globe by four of the five largest computer manufacturers. It has become the leading PC platform in Indonesia and much of Southeast Asia. It has also been selected as the standard operating system for the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and in coming months it will be adopted as the primary platform by a number of other Latin American countries."
The article is by Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance, and is taken from his new book, A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.
Blame those pouring trillions into military & commercial instead of real human problems and not tech geniuses.
Right! We should forget investing in military and commercial products and invest money in solving problems like getting food, clothing, shelter, and communications! What has military investment brought us? I mean other than GPS? We need ways to get food from people who grow it to those who need it. I mean that government funded GPS and highway system are nice but we need people to talk to each other. That military project that brought us the Internet is great but what about satellites? I mean we got to space on the back of military funding into rockets but what did we get from that? I mean other than cheap commercial air transport. I mean the military funding got us to space, an interstate highway system, commercial airlines, but what about... SHIPS! The military didn't do any funding on shipping did they? I mean other than after World War II handing over the factories and machines to build warships to commercial ship builders. And giving factories for tanks and warplanes so they could make passenger cars, farm tractors, air transport planes, and those ships I mentioned. Other than all of that what has military spending brought us? Other than highways, the Internet, airplanes, GPS, ships, satellite communications, what has military spending got us? Did military spending get us cheap computers that we use everyday? FUCK!
Enough snark. Just about everything we enjoy in modern society comes from developments in military spending. Commercial spending does the same. They develop products for the wealthy because they have the money to spend on these things. As they figure out how to make them cheaper and better they trickle down to those with less money. This spending by governments and commerce is how we have what we have.Taking that away helps no one.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The key figures (Mark Z and Bill G) along with the key corps (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM) I mentioned above, unfortunately, have decided to cramp their little brains with "Social Justice" mantra that takes them further and further away from true enlightenment, and thus, have lost their 'purpose of being'
Don't put them all in the same bucket. All those companies will profess their love of "diversity" because it's trendy, but Google and Facebook stand apart from the others in your list as they actively try to shove their social agenda down the throat of people.
As for Bill Gates, his philantropy is basically a scam. His foundation is a steamroller that crushes existing NGOs and promotes a very narrow vision of charity, which happens to profit him and his cronies immensely. That's hardly a social agenda like the one at Google, it's just more typical Microsoft (embrace extend extinguish).
lucm, indeed.
China is throwing tons of money at worthless projects: cities with no residents, massive investment in research with no accountability for quality, and huge state-sponsored projects that regularly fail - such as bridges and dams.
That kind of comment is somewhere between "hindsight is 20/20" and reversed survival bias. You look at things that failed and ignore those that worked.
The population of Shanghai went from 16 to 24 million people in the last 15 years. That's more than 500,000 newcomers *every year*. Those people need a roof over their head, they need food, they need plumbing and waste management, transportation, etc. And Shanghai is not even among the fastest growing city in China. For instance Zhengzhou went from 3 million to 9 million in 5 years - that's like transforming Phoenix into NYC in 5 years.
And it's not just about the population density. A decade ago, China was importing garbage from the USA to recycle and extract resources. They no longer do that because their industry is catching up; in fact, more and more they don't even bother shipping back containers when they send stuff to the USA, they sell them on the cheap or even trash them. Another sign that they're moving ahead full speed is that the bulk of their industrial capacity goes to the domestic market. The crap you can buy at Walmart is a drop in the bucket compared to the volume they're selling to the new Chinese middle class, which is amazing.
China has been growing at a crazy speed, and mistakes are made here and there, but I'd be curious to see how well you personally would succeed with those kinds of challenges. This is more complicated than playing SimCity.
lucm, indeed.
1.) Trying to explain to idiots how they're doing things wrong and trying to correct them? ... Very difficult. As soon as they're overwelmed they'll start voting for Trump and Co. and things will go downhill from there.
2.) Exploiting idiots and getting obscenely rich whilst giving them PHP doodads / toy apps or virutal swords? ... Very easy. You just once need to fathom how truely unbelievably stupid most people are and what stupid shit they will spend money on, then you're good.
Bottom line:
While I get that we need to save the world (Elon Musk is showing us how it can be done) I also get the enticing proposition of simply manipulating the masses and enjoying yourself while doing it. If you get bored, then you can go about saving the world. Which is basically what Bill Gates and the likes are doing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Even nobel prize winners are trying to make a quick buck from publishing their books, instead of spreading their ideas to a bigger audience free of charge. Definition of irony?
Obama won a Nobel prize for peace, then went on to spend the most money on the military in the history of the USA, on top of vastly expanding NSA spying programs and establishing a formal kill list.
Think I'm kidding?
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05... ^ yes, NY times, not breitbart or fox news
It's more hypocrisy than irony, though.
It's a difficult job to be president. The alternative to your narrative is that there are very bad people in the world who wish to kill lots of innocent people. The decision to eliminate such people is one that should not be taken lightly. Escalating this decision to the top executive shows that these decisions are taken very seriously.
Giving Obama the Nobel Peace prize was a huge mistake in both timing (too early) and merit (undeserved). But the President should be involved directly in drone strike targets. Otherwise these decisions would be made by unelected military officials, and that sounds very troubling to me.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.